Why Mobile-First Marketing Matters in 2014

For years mobile was treated as an afterthought, a stripped down version of the real website, usually built last and tested least. That thinking is finished. Time spent online in the United States has crossed over to mobile devices, and the businesses still shipping a desktop site with a cramped mobile fallback are the ones quietly losing customers they never see.

The tipping point has arrived

comScore’s measurement of US digital media time tells the story plainly: mobile devices, counting apps and mobile browsing together, have overtaken desktop and now account for roughly 60% of time spent online. Four years ago that figure was a fraction of this. Very few shifts in consumer behavior move this fast, and almost none of them reverse.

The number that matters for a small business is narrower than the national one. Check your own analytics before you argue about this. Local services, restaurants, and retail routinely see phone traffic well past half of all sessions, and it is usually higher on evenings and weekends, which is exactly when people are deciding where to spend money.

Mobile first is an editing discipline, not a screen size

The phrase is widely misunderstood as "make sure it fits on a phone." What Luke Wroblewski argued when he coined it is more demanding: design the phone experience first, because the constraint forces you to decide what actually matters, and then let the layout expand as the screen grows. Teams that go the other direction start with everything and try to subtract, which never works. Nobody volunteers to cut their own section.

This is why mobile first tends to improve the desktop site too. A page that survived the editing required to work on a phone is a page with a clear hierarchy and one obvious next action.

What mobile-first actually requires

• Responsive layouts that reflow to any screen, using the fluid grid and media query approach Ethan Marcotte set out in 2010, rather than a separate m-dot site you will forget to update.
• Tap targets sized for a thumb with real spacing between them. A link that is easy to hit with a mouse is often a coin flip with a thumb.
• Ruthless weight reduction. Many visitors are on 3G, and a page built for office broadband is functionally broken on a train.
• Short forms. Every extra field costs conversions, and the cost is far higher on a phone keyboard than on a desktop.
• Click to call and a working map for local businesses. Mobile searches skew heavily toward immediate intent, and a phone number that is not tappable is a wasted visit.

Email is mobile too, and most templates have not noticed

The same shift is happening in the inbox, and it is easier to ignore because the numbers live in a different dashboard. Multi-column newsletters designed for a monitor in 2010 arrive on a phone as a wall of pinch-and-zoom. Single column, generous type, one clear call to action, and a subject line that survives truncation at around 35 characters on a small screen.

One practical detail people miss: if your call to action sits below three screens of scrolling on a phone, it effectively does not exist. Put it where a thumb can reach it early.

Written by

Valon Badivuku

Digital Strategist

Valon Badivuku is a Digital Strategist at ThisCom, helping brands get seen and become visible online through strategies that turn attention into lasting growth.

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